Last week we reported how NASA scientists were referencing Star Trek, when announcing the discovery of a new type of life. Now we have Google promising that they are working on a "Star Trek future" for talking to computers. Plus, it appears the Chinese are working hard on teleportation.

Google promises ‘Star Trek future’ in computer voice tech

Google has acquired the Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company based in Cambridge, England who have had success in creating natural computer speech.

Phonetic Arts Generator promises "the ability to say anything in a faithful reproduction of a real voice"

And when Google announced the acquisition on their official Blog, Speech Technology Mike Cohen referenced Star Trek twice:

In Star Trek, they don’t spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards—they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back. It’s a more natural way to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems.

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We already have a strong engineering center in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team. We are excited about their technology, and while we don’t have plans to share yet, we’re confident that together we’ll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future.

So how long until our computers star talking to us, and even flirting with us, as happened with Kirk in the Star Trek episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday" (see clip below).

Chinese working on transporters?

In the last week there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Wikileaks disclosure of classified cables from the US State Department. Today Popular Science noted one cable that details some of the advanced work being done by scientists in the People’s Republic in a variety of fields from plasma physics, nuclear fusion, and even quantum teleportation.

China’s University of Science and Technology hard at work on future tech

…the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Science at the Microscale (HFNL). HFNL has 95 faculty members and roughly 400 graduate students. HFNL research focuses on quantum communication, nanoscience, superconductors, spintronics, and cognitive sciences. In the area of quantum communication, HFNL was conducting research in quantum teleportation and free space quantum cryptography that scientists hope will result in “totally secure” communications. USTC also oversees China’s “Program 178,” although they did not describe the nature of this program. (COMMENT: A cursory walk through their labs seemed to indicate they had already succeeded in single-particle quantum teleportation and are now trying to conduct dual-particle quantum teleportation. END COMMENT)

Of course this kind of quantum teleportation is a long way from the Star Trek transporters, but it appears the Chinese are leading the field. Could it be that the first to say "one to beam up" will be headed to a Chinese spaceship? Let’s just hope they don’t end up with so many transporter accidents as seen in Star Trek’s future, such as this scene when Captain Kirk is split in two (good and evil) in "The Enemy Within"

I believe that the Germans experimented with this sorta stuff in WW2, if I’m not mistaken. Who says that we are not leaps and bounds ahead of the Chinese. We did spare a few scientists from their day in court after the war.

Computer. (Working). Take me to Trekmovie.com. (Working). Hmm.Would beCool. With my I Phone you can talk into it and it can turn that into Text. Just like in Tos Assignment Earth except on a Phone instead of a typerwritter.

The biggest obstacle to having transporters is a well-known principle of quantum mechanics called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It basically says it’s impossible to know all the characteristics of a subatomic particle (e.g. electron) at the same time. For example, once you start measuring a particle’s precise location, you start losing information about its other characteristics (like momentum). Measure momentum, and you get less accurate info about its location. It’s not exactly an intuitive concept.

Transporters would probably depend on isolating all these particles and having data on all these characteristics in order to take someone apart and put them back together again. So, it’s very possible this technology may never be developed. Then again, Trek gets around this by making occasional references to the “Heisenberg compensators,” so you never know!

Yeah, I know the Americans had it too, but the Germans were screwing around with that and all sorts of stuff too, even hover technology. Granted, most of this is just stuff you see on the History Channel shows about the Nazi’s and the Occult, but it’s interesting, to say the least.

The “few” comment about scientists was more or less meant to be a snide remark. I was well aware of history played out in regards to that.

There was a Season 3 episode of The X-Files that dealt with this technology (philly experiment), or Mulders theory of it…it turned out that the ship actually just had something wrong with the water supply and the crew (and ship) aged quickly because of that.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that the Chinese are leaders in the field in that they actually have a research team, as opposed to everyone else who spent the money on something that can actually be done.

Until they make transporters that don’t rip the delta shield off your left nipple, these things will never be safe.

Ian M. Banks (who includes plenty of Trek references) calls his gadget a “displacement” sumthinorother, implying that if you tug at one end of the universe an exact replica appears at the other end. Dunno if there’s any science in that, but it’s a good image to start from.

100-200 years ago a lot of things could not be done. Evan organ transplants 45 years ago were questioned its an old story. With hard work and open mindedness, a lot will come to past.evan transporters. And talking computers. Great! I felt this was better then keyboards. Remember what scotty comented on The voyage Home. About Keyboards, “how quant” and I agree

@23 be that as it may, it’s still a physical imposability. Heisenberg proved it can’t be done but I loved that nod that Star Trek gave to his theory with Heisenberg Compensators. I mean re-materialising an object perfectly just sounds unlikely.

Wormholes I can get on board with, even warp drive is theoretically possible with the right power source but Transporter technology is just too out there.

Not very Star Trek of those of you with the anti-China bias. Try to respect Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. In the midst of the Cold War, Gene Roddenberry included a Russian in the crew. What may be valid today about China likely will not be in 250 years. The transporters on the Enterprise we know and love could be devised and built by Chinese. So what?